Change default editor

January 14, 2007

There is a quick way to change your default editor, whichever you want.

First open up a terminal by going to Applications > Accessories > Terminal (in Ubuntu) or press Alt + F2 and type in terminal. Now that you have a terminal open, let’s get down to viewing your history.

Open up .bashrc by typing:

vim ~/.bashrc

Now to change your bash default editor find.

export EDITOR

However, if you can’t find that, just add this to the top.

export EDITOR=vim

Personally I like vim. You can use pico (/usr/bin/pico), nano (/usr/bin/nano), or any other editor you like.

Like always, you can learn more about this by doing the following:

man bash